Other Impacts | Building a Blueprint to Measure the Unknown

The transcript has been edited for easier reading, excluding filler words and repetitions, adapting grammar and sentence structure.

Dan: So how’s life in Switzerland?

Matthias: Good. Yeah. Really good.

Dan: You and I have actually sat before and recorded one of these a few years ago during COVID with the lovely people from Seaspiracy. We were focusing on everything that was going on during COVID. They had released this film on Netflix that had done very well, and we had the unique opportunity to chat with them and really dig deep behind that film and how it related to what we were doing at The Ocean Cleanup.

Matthias, can you reintroduce yourself and tell me your current role at The Ocean Cleanup?

Matthias: Thanks, Dan, and thanks for having me again. Now officially, and this one’s in person too, which is a lot better. I’m Matthias Egger, Head of Environmental and Social Affairs here at The Ocean Cleanup. Together with my team, I look into everything related to the environment, society, and people.

How is plastic pollution impacting marine life? How is it impacting coastal communities? At the same time, how are we potentially impacting them? Think about our cleanup system in the middle of the ocean. We try to catch plastic, and we mostly do, but there’s a chance that some marine life might get caught with the plastics. We need to understand if we are doing more harm than good by taking some marine life out of the ocean.

In terms of social impacts, think of rivers. People live around the areas where we intercept plastics. We have excavators, like the ones in Guatemala, that might make some noise. How is this impacting the communities around those rivers? We also handle environmental permitting, ensuring compliance with regulations and engaging the local community early in the process. They have all the local knowledge, and it’s crucial for our mission to succeed.

Dan: One of the things I love when I go into the field is talking to the local fishermen. They’ve been doing this for generations. When they see what we’re doing and understand how it helps them, it’s enlightening.

How important is it for us to maintain these local relationships?

Matthias: It’s incredibly important. We’ve never had a blueprint for this. There’s no 20-year-old guide on how to do this because it’s the first time we’re tackling these issues in rivers and oceans. We’re creating a blueprint for future impact.

And that’s what makes it so exciting. I’m a scientist by training, and I like the challenge of the unknown. The Ocean Cleanup exists to protect marine life and humans from the devastating impacts of plastic pollution. It’s important to understand the problem, talk to impacted communities, and study the ecosystems affected by plastic pollution.

There may not be an existing blueprint, but it’s a no-brainer to engage with these communities and gather their insights. We’ve been fortunate to have river deployments in diverse areas with different environments and cultures, from Guatemala to Jamaica to Malaysia to LA. These experiences have taught us valuable lessons.

A blueprint is something you develop over the years and constantly refine. Now, we start to understand the things we need to consider, like social impacts and community engagement efforts. We need to understand the environmental impact before deploying anything. The Ocean Cleanup is pioneering this approach, often going beyond what other organizations do with environmental and social impact assessments.

Dan: What does an environmental and social impact assessment entail?

Matthias: Before you do anything, you stop and look into the situation. You assess what happens if you deploy technology there. It’s about understanding the baseline and the potential impacts before taking action.

What are the potential negative impacts you could have? Think of CO₂ emissions, bycatch, noise, smell, and all of that. You then come up with an environmental social management plan that defines how you mitigate those risks. Very importantly, it doesn’t stop there. The most important phase actually comes afterwards, which is the monitoring.

You need to make sure you are actually mitigating the risks and identifying all the risks. You need to ensure you have a net positive impact on the environment and society. This is a constant cycle of iterations and improvements. We do this by literally sending people out on every ocean trip we do to monitor.

Dan: Tell me a little bit about what they look for and what we’ve learned so far. We’ve only been doing this for a few years, and we’re gaining knowledge and learning. What have you learned?

Matthias: A lot, haha. I’ve been with The Ocean Cleanup for over 6 years. It’s a short period of time, but quite long for an organization that young.

First of all, we’re operating in what we call the deserts of the sea. These areas don’t have much marine life because there’s not much food. But they’re also so remote that most people, including scientists, cannot study those ecosystems. Scientists usually apply for shipping time and grants to study ecosystems, but they often only go out in the summer to avoid the rough winter conditions.

What The Ocean Cleanup is doing is being out there almost the entire year for many years in a row now. We’re starting to get data from such a remote area, from different years and seasons, and we can start studying that ecosystem. In the beginning, we had very little understanding of that ecosystem, but now we start to understand what kind of animals we see there.

Matthias: You might have heard about the Neuston, the small creatures that swim on top of the ocean. Think of jellyfish-like creatures, though they’re not really jellyfish. One of these creatures, a snail, lives out there in the middle of the open ocean. It’s about 6,000 meters deep, and it cannot swim. It makes bubbles and uses them as a raft to hang on. It’s a fascinating and scary life.

We’re pushing the boundaries of our knowledge, trying to understand that ecosystem and how humans impact it. There’s plastic pollution impacting it, but also climate change. All the data we gather helps us understand the ecosystem, how it works, and how humans are impacting it.

Dan: Give me a specific example from the river side of things. We’re deploying technology in rivers all over the world that are different, like Jamaica, Malaysia, and Guatemala. What are some similarities in the wildlife and learnings over almost 5 years?

Matthias: The main difference when comparing rivers to oceans is that in oceans, we look into the negative impacts that occur during cleanup operations. In relatively pristine environments, there’s marine life and pollution. In rivers, they are so highly polluted that there’s hardly any life left. It’s not just the plastic; there’s untreated wastewater from settlements and industrial runoff going into the rivers. They’re highly polluted with chemicals and heavy metals, making them almost dead ecosystems.

In rivers, the impact we’re having is not so much around our interceptor but where the plastic would otherwise go. It often ends up in mangroves, coral reefs, or on coastlines and beaches. Those are the ecosystems we need to study, not the river itself. We’re intercepting plastic and preventing it from going into the ocean.

At the end of a river mouth, when you transition from river to ocean, you have very vulnerable and sensitive ecosystems. These ecosystems provide essential services to communities and our climate. They are important carbon sinks, produce a lot of oxygen, and serve as fishery nurseries. Mangroves, for example, are emerging as a hot topic. They offer numerous services, such as acting as nurseries for fish, capturing carbon, and preventing coastline erosion.

With more storms, hurricanes, and extreme weather conditions due to climate change, these services are becoming increasingly crucial.

Matthias: The main difference when comparing rivers to oceans is that in oceans, we look into the negative impacts that occur during cleanup operations. In a relatively pristine environment, there’s marine life and pollution. But in rivers, they are so highly polluted there’s hardly any life in them anymore. There’s untreated wastewater from settlements and industrial runoff going into the rivers, making them highly polluted with chemicals and heavy metals. These are almost dead ecosystems.

Our focus is now shifting a little bit away from where we intercept the plastic. We look into where the plastic would go if not intercepted. Often, it goes into mangroves, coral reefs, or onto coastlines and beaches. Those are the ecosystems you need to study. We are not cleaning the river; we are intercepting plastic and preventing it from going into the ocean. At the end of a river mouth, when you transition from river to ocean, that’s where you have very vulnerable and sensitive ecosystems. These ecosystems provide crucial services to communities and our climate, such as carbon sinks, oxygen production, and fish nurseries.

Dan: So the mangroves are a hot topic because they provide numerous services besides acting as a nursery for fish. They capture a lot of carbon and prevent coastline erosion, which is increasingly important as more storms and extreme weather conditions arise due to climate change. How do we direct our efforts given the human connection to rivers?

Matthias: It’s a very good question. One of the biggest benefits of our ocean operations is making an invisible problem visible to humanity. Very few people actually go into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, so they don’t perceive that problem as a problem, even though it’s impacting them. If you kill the ocean, it kills the oxygen-producing ecosystem of the planet and climate regulation, impacting everyone. What we do is make the problem visible. Every time you see us dumping trash onto our boats, we show the world how much plastic is out there.

In terms of impact on humans, rivers have a bigger impact because that’s where people live and are affected by plastic pollution. But it’s not an either-or question. We are solving two different things. If you’re only one person, you might solve rivers before going into the ocean, but we can do all of that simultaneously. Cleaning up what’s already in the ocean solves an existing problem. In rivers, you start cleaning the coastlines because almost all of the plastic from a river into the ocean stays within a relatively short distance. It impacts coastal ecosystems, mangroves, corals, beaches, and the people interacting with them.

What we are really good at The Ocean Cleanup is tackling a global problem from a holistic, high-level view while solving it locally. For example, in Kingston, Jamaica, we intercept plastic in the gullies that bring it into the harbor area and remove the legacy pollution already there. This approach shows that if it works on a small scale, it can also work globally.

Dan: We get a lot of critics at The Ocean Cleanup. Some say we should pick one focus over the other. How do you handle the criticism, especially when people claim we reuse the same plastic baskets or fake the collected trash?

Matthias: First of all, there’s more than one yellow basket out there. And yes, we do get criticism, but overwhelmingly we receive positive feedback. Most criticism comes from a few scientists who worry about specific parts of the ecosystem we might impact or fear we feed into the plastics lobby’s narrative. Listening to criticism helps us improve. Some criticism is valid and has helped us improve. But some criticisms are just desperate attempts to find loopholes, saying it’s too good to be true or fake.

When accusations of fakery came out, it was a shift for me. I realized that some criticisms were just desperate attempts to discredit us. Inviting critics to join us on our trips and see the reality has helped. We’ve published our work in peer-reviewed science, talked to scientists, and more and more are willing to team up with us. They see the great opportunity we have to collect data and understand the source of the trash.

Dan: Another thing that has helped is the INC, the global plastics treaty. How do you see this going over the next few years?

Matthias: INC, the global plastics treaty, is an exciting journey. All nations come together to figure out a solution to environmental plastic pollution, including in the marine environment. There are five rounds of negotiations. I’ve been to two of them. The last round will be in Korea at the end of this year, and by then we should have a global plastics treaty. It’s been a very interesting personal journey to witness these negotiations, which are frustratingly slow. Finding an agreement on a global scale is challenging, but I see a lot of potential in it.

It reinforced to me how important cleanups are. They buy us time to figure out the problem at its root. The treaty increases the visibility of the problem to people and politicians, the decision-makers who can act on a local level and make a big impact. Although the process is slow, it sends a signal that tough regulations might be coming, encouraging proactive changes.

Dan: It’s similar to the climate treaty, drawing awareness and putting the problem on a global scale. This visibility is crucial.

Matthias: Yes, and it’s going faster compared to the climate agreements. Those negotiations started in the nineties and took decades. With the plastics treaty, we are talking about two years, maybe three.

Sure, I’ll process the transcript for you. Here’s the cleaned-up version with filler words removed, grammatical errors fixed, section titles added, and speaker names included:

Dan: But that is going really, really fast for such a global treaty. And yes, it does increase visibility. I’m also very happy to see that initially, it started with ocean plastic pollution.

Matthias: I’m very happy to see that they took it a step further and really addressed plastic pollution not only in the ocean but throughout the entire lifecycle of plastics. When I give lectures at the university, I often ask students, from all the plastic we produce, how much do you think actually ends up in the ocean? Most students would say more than 50%.

The answer is less than 1%. So, very little. It’s still a lot of plastic going into the ocean, and there’s a lot of plastic there, but it’s very little compared to all the plastic that we use and produce. It shows plastic pollution is actually a problem on land. It’s also a big problem on land.

A lot of the plastic has chemicals in it that are bad for human health. Every now and then, you read a new study like microplastics found in male testicles, microplastics found in the placenta. It’s everywhere. It’s not only the plastic particles that are the problem; it’s the chemicals that come with the plastic. You add chemicals to plastic to make it a desirable product, make it last longer, more flexible etcetera. Those additives, those chemicals, are really harmful to human health. Also, plastics are made from oil, which involves oil extraction and its environmental and human health impacts.

Matthias: Then there’s recycling. Very often, people say we just have to recycle more, but a lot of plastic products cannot be recycled. Each product is different, and very often, you don’t know what’s in those plastic products. The treaty is looking into some regulations. If you’re a plastic producer, you need to disclose what’s in your product to make it easier to recycle. We really have to think about the whole lifecycle of plastics. This is important, and it will eventually solve ocean plastic pollution. I’m happy to see that we’re addressing plastic pollution on a global scale.

Dan: How does a guy like Matthias take some of the air out of the tires? When you’re not doing the science stuff, how do you shut it off? What do you do on a weekend where you have nothing ocean cleanup-related bouncing around your brain?

Matthias: There’s always a small part of my brain thinking about ocean cleanup. It’s not taking over the weekends, but it’s still there because the mission is close to my heart. I really want to solve, understand, and solve that problem. But it also doesn’t mean I’m only here for work. I have a family, and having a small kid is a very effective tool to take my brain off work because the kid needs attention. I love going out in nature and explaining things to him. I do a lot of sports; it helps me. I go running, play football with friends, go hiking into the Alps, far away from the ocean. It’s easy to escape the ocean in Switzerland. Working remotely helps too. As soon as I close my laptop, I’m surrounded by a different environment. Most of my friends and family have nothing to do with the ocean, so we talk about other stuff.

Dan: I get it when you say there’s something always bouncing around because I often travel to remote places with clean rivers, like national parks in the US or elsewhere. I’ll often catch myself standing on a bridge, looking at the river, thinking, if there was an interceptor here, where would it go? How would it look? And this is in a national park. I remember you telling me something similar, like when you’re on holiday and your wife tells you to stop looking at the water.

Matthias: Yeah, my beach vacations are totally screwed.

Dan: There’s no such thing as a beach vacation anymore once you’ve worked for ocean cleanup. It always involves searching for plastics.

Matthias: The good thing is now I have some backup. I used to be alone, but now I take my kid, and we walk along the beach looking for microplastics. My wife sits and enjoys the sun while we find bottles or microplastics. It’s hilarious and sad.

Dan: It’s crazy. But I have to imagine that some of the conversations you’ve had in the last six years have been beyond interesting. When you look back at your career at The Ocean Cleanup, what stands out as one of the most interesting experiences?

Matthias: The deepest experience I had was going out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. You’ve been there, so you know that awe moment when you’re out there. I knew it wasn’t an island of trash, but I still expected to find some kind of island out there. You sail for five days, and then you’re in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it looks the same as it did five days ago. Then you start seeing all this trash around you. The moment that got me most was seeing a kid’s toy floating out there. It’s so remote, and you see a kid’s toy floating out there. It hit close to home, like this should not be out here. Seeing face masks all over corals in the Dominican Republic after the pandemic was another intense moment. It showed we’re moving from one problem to another without thinking about the consequences.

Dan: In the science community, there are these scientific papers that you and Laurent are often writing. For people who may not be familiar, what are they, and how are they useful in the world?

Matthias: That’s a very deep question. We do science, and our studies have a lot of important findings. But very often, these studies are read only by the scientific community and then end up somewhere in a drawer. What we do at The Ocean Cleanup is we have a communications team that translates those findings into digestible content. It shows why this is important, why we should worry about it, and how we can solve the problem. The translation of science to outreach and communications is what I love most about working here. For example, one study we published found that most plastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are fishing gear, not plastic from land. This finding changed the perception of plastic pollution and showed that local actions could solve local problems.

Dan: How would you like to see us grow with that? We can have an impact socially and educationally, right? How would you like us to do that going forward?

Matthias: Jamaica is a good example of how we should do things. Suleiman and the team are doing a great job getting local communities involved. You create awareness of what they perceive as the problem. Often, what we think is a problem is not what they think is a problem. You need to show them the consequences of pollution and how it affects them. Education is also crucial. School kids get involved and bring that knowledge back home, which can be eye-opening for the parents. We’re also doing similar things in Mumbai, involving waste pickers who make a living from plastic pollution. You need to show them other ways to make money and survive.

Matthias: We learned a lot in Jamaica, but there’s always room for improvement. Social aspects are crucial if we want to succeed in our mission. The problem is caused by humans and impacts humans. If we don’t consider that, we will never succeed, especially in the rivers.

Dan: Speaking of succeeding and the next generation, you and I are similar generationally. We were born into a world where we didn’t know this was a problem, and it’s evolved in our lifetime. Your child is born into a world where we know how big the problem is but has the potential to solve it. How does that make you feel?

Matthias: Very often, you hear that we’re doomed and this is the last generation on a livable planet. I challenge that. We could be the first generation to be truly sustainable. Humanity has a history of non-sustainability. Now we have the knowledge and tools to solve the problems. I’d rather be now, knowing the problem and working on solutions than the generation before us that only started studying the problems. I’m thinking of climate change, for example. We knew about it for decades, but only now we have clean tech to address it. It’s an exciting time to be alive. Of course, there are big problems to solve, and we need to hurry, but I dismiss the claim that it’s too late. Prevention, education, and technological solutions can lead us to a more promising future.

Dan: I completely agree. I have hope in the next generation. I think with what you’re doing and what we’re doing here at The Ocean Cleanup and what many other organizations are doing, it gives me even greater hope. In 50 years, we will have different problems, but at least we can say we’ve solved this one.

Matthias, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Everyone listening, please keep following us. Check out what Matthias and our scientific team at The Ocean Cleanup are up to. We couldn’t do it without your support. Thank you for following us and supporting us.